Outside the venue the touts are under-cutting the box office and struggling with difficult customers: "c'mon tosser, you can 'ave it for a tenner!"
Lou Reed, it seems, is not the force he once was as testified by this one and only date in the capital at the relatively intimate Shepherd's Bush Empire. Nonetheless, Lou's inability to pack out Wembley Stadium has less to do with a decline in the popularity of his classic recordings - both with and without the Velvet Underground - than it has with his refusal to look back on those recordings.
Tonight he seems perfectly happy to be playing his new material with his super-tight band of similarly leather-clad session types - just good ol' guitar, bass and drums.
There will be no classics. Instead, we will enjoy an impassioned - by Lou Reed's standards - set made up, mostly, of material from last year's 'Ecstasy' and those song's written since he enjoyed a second lease of life with the release of 1989's truly impressive album, 'New York'.
Still, he happily batters to death possibly that album's highlight, 'Romeo Had Juliet', as he lazily syncopates, or rather sings out of time, the spoken word vocals. He's happier though when it's time to turn to the unquestionable highlight from 'Ecstasy', the hilariously bleak 'Rock Minuet'. Hilarious because cheery old Lou delivers, in deadly serious poet-story teller mode, lines like; "in the back of the warehouse were a couple of guys / they tied someone up and sown up their eyes / and he got so excited that he came on his thighs."
It's surely one of his daftest extremes yet, but the performance is impeccable, the song drawn out into an achingly subtle (musically) lament for a life gone wrong. Of course, the old man's to blame for the son's disturbingly masochistic sexuality.
Since 'New York' much of the power of Reed's work has been derived from a rather unhealthy dose of self-loathing at odds with an indignant anger, a sort of 'I hate myself for cheating on you but you bloody drove me to it' attitude. It's not pretty but it's certainly effective. So we're offered guitars sparring with each other like warring partners as he recounts another ugly tale of domestic breakdown on 'Tatters'.
When the guitars churn out precise chords with the unfailing regularity of a piston, Reed appears to be little more than an embittered and somewhat more metallic take on Don Henley. When he offers the lyrical complexity and subtle musical beauty of 'Ecstasy' he remains little short of the genius that wrote some of the best rock and roll songs ever recorded.
When the band close their set by joining together at the front of the stage for a couple of bows like a bunch of ageing thespians, we're reminded that Lou thinks of himself as nothing short of an artist and poet.
In truth, the past decade has simply seen him cement his position as rock's greatest subversive advertising copywriter ('I'll take Manhattan in a garbage can with Latin written on it that says, 'it's hard to give a shit these days').
What's certain is that the comfort that has come to Richard Ashcroft so early in life continues to elude Lou Reed and this fact alone continues to make him very possibly the only over 50-year-old rock star worth paying attention to.
